WOLE SOYINKA
Vice President Emeritus

Nigerian poet and playwright Wole Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. He writes in English and his language is marked by great scope and richness. During the civil war in Nigeria, Mr. Soyinka was arrested, accused of conspiring with the Biafra rebels, and held as a political prisoner for 22 months.

Soyinka has published over 20 works, including the novel The Interpreters (1965), a complex narrative work that has been compared to Joyce’s and Faulkner’s, and Season of Anomy (1973), which confronts the Orpheus and Euridice myth with the mythology of the Yoruba. Purely autobiographical are The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972) and the account of his childhood, Aké (1981). His essays are collected in Myth, Literature and the African World (1975).

He has been visiting professor periodically at the universities of Cambridge, Sheffield, Yale, Emory and UNLV. Wole Soyinka is a founder of the City of Refuge programs both in Europe and in North America.